Crawlspace

The doorway at the bottom of the basement stairs didn’t have anything hinged to it and it wasn’t closed or blocked-off, so I just peeked in to look for a mop. I had broken the last one and the laundry room didn’t hold an extra one. No one was ever home while I cleaned, so I couldn’t ask anyone. Since cleaning here, I didn’t usually come down to this family’s basement. Someone’s personal space was established in the lit, carpeted side to the right of the stairs. This area to the left wasn’t personal and incriminating, didn’t seem to be private, and may just hold the mop I needed in order to finish my cleaning job at this house.

I leaned in and then took a step. Dark corners swallowed the sound in the dim, chilled room, and with the light coming from behind me I could see that the space was, in fact, probably never used. The dry, dust-ghosted area was shaped like two joined sides of a square, reaching to my right for about eight feet, and reaching ahead into the windowless darkness for perhaps twelve. The plywood cubicle-style shelves on the walls to my right were placed practically, with great intentions, I’m sure, at head height for things to be kept unless need for a project. But there were few if any things on those shelves, and for all I know the dust in the room was from their disintegration as they were slowly forgotten out of existence.

In the darkness I didn’t focus on those shelves as much as on the sturdy worktable that was attached waist-high to the wall. Following along the inside corner of the wall, the work surface sat comatose, long past waiting for someone to put it to use. I saw lonely fixing-paraphernalia scattered – for as much as two things can be scattered. A screwdriver, maybe one of each kind of screwdriver, lay on the surface with dark oblong spots that were screws and nails. They weren’t quite huddled together, inches apart due to embarrassment that they hadn’t properly done what they were supposed to, and so were abandoned forever. Nothing else rested on the shelf, but if work tools could have souls I might have seen their ghosts set resolutely against the wall on that shelf, and lurking beneath it. As I looked, though, there was nothing. It occurred to me that the husband-owner of the house works his projects out of the garage outside the house. It shouldn’t seem so strange to see a deserted workroom in this house.

I tiptoed in as though in respect of the dead worktable. There were some long handles standing and leaning against the protruding corner to the right ahead of me, across from the work area. I walked over and noticed that one was a shovel and the other a rake. They, too, seemed to be asleep, kinetically atrophied while waiting too long for their destiny to be fulfilled. No mop was there. If there had been, perhaps it would have been asleep too, and cranky as I woke it up to finish my morning. This uncarpeted room seemed to be the graveyard of usefulness, the hospice of tools that had no more spirit.

Turning toward the lit rectangle of the carpeted basement, almost giving up my search, I noted that in the corner at the dark end of the other leg of the room, a rectangular empty spot swallowed the light that had washed up on the rest of the wall. A closet would be the ideal place to hide an extra mop, I thought matter-of-factly, heading to that corner with less-quiet steps that whispered on dusty concrete. I approached the silent doorway that seemed to hold its breath in fear that someone noticed it. Past the frame and threshold, I saw what I thought was the back of the closet, but when I looked straight into the doorway, the left of the inside opened to a whole other room that echoed the size of the bedroom on the floor above it. Startled by the unexpected space inside the dark closet, I stood slightly to the side so that the minute glow of remaining light from the basement doorway could tell me what the room contained.

I almost didn’t register the sight that slowly crept out of the shadowed room. Just to the left inside the door, I saw what I at first thought was the top edge of a solid, square wooden chair, but realized it was three times that long. And about three feet to its right was another one, then two more matching long chair-backs sat about three feet on the far side of each of them, and as my eyes adjusted I eventually saw that I was looking at eight wooden three-person pews that faced away from me, with an aisle of darkness between them. How strange that they would be storing these here, I thought at first. Was this their daughters’ play room as children?

It was when I noted the glowering blotch of an angular podium in the middle of a raised dais on the far end, that a sudden chill enveloped me. The pews weren’t being stored. They weren’t playfully arranged for pretend. The echo of my feet’s nervous shifting in the sparse room suggested that nothing else was being stored there. This was a functional sanctuary! What was this doing here? Did this family hold meetings here? No, they weren’t inclined toward that sort of thing… were they?

I stared at it all for a few shocked seconds, and then with the feeling that the invisible patrons had all turned in the darkness to see who was interrupting, and the orator had stopped to glare unhappily at me through the bleak glow, I backed-away from the corner doorway. There was no mop, I would not find a mop in this basement, and I could go one day without mopping. I would bring my own mop next time. I had crossed some sort of line when I found that room, I thought, and the house’s family shouldn’t know I’d found it.

I left the workroom quickly, happy to find the light of the carpeted basement, and hurried up the stairs to the kitchen. I wrote an apologetic note about not mopping. I left the house with my cleaning supplies, I drove home, I made lunch, I walked to meet my children at their school. The day went on. I told only my sister and my husband about the strange little nave in the basement. It was a moment that passed. For a year. With only one or two pondering thoughts, in delight of the strangeness of that find.

Then the person who lived in their basement moved, and the husband house-owner wanted to use it for his own art hobbies. I was asked to go down and vacuum the carpet. I did as I was bid, and I didn’t at first notice that the doorway to the left of the basement stairs was gone. On my way up those basement stairs, while vacuuming, I saw that there was a wall where the workroom door had been. They must have had work done down here during two weeks between my visits, I thought. For months I vacuumed downstairs, and each time I knocked on the section that would have been a doorway to hear any hollow tone or find any loose evidence of it having become a shorter sliding door. I checked the shelving that was now cubby-holed into the top three feet of the wall, but couldn’t find proof of the room behind it. The door area looked just like the rest of the wall, so whoever covered it up did a professional job of making it look like it had never been there.

I wanted to ask about it, but didn’t want to sound as though I were snooping around their house. Perplexed, I finally thought of a clever ruse by which to ask the wife house-owner about the door.

“I might be thinking of a different house with a similar floorplan,” I lied, “but I have to ask: did there used to be a doorway to the left at the bottom of the basement stairs?”

She looked to the side in thought as she listened to the question, but answered quite assuredly, “No. There has never been a doorway there.”

“Huh,” I watched her for any sign of retracting her answer for any reason. “’Cause I knew you had some work done down there earlier this year, but it wasn’t to cover the doorway?”

She shook her head. “No, we didn’t cover a door.”

“Well, I must be thinking of somewhere else. I used to clean a lot of different houses.”

The moment passed. For her. But it plagued me for a long, mysterious year. Was there any way she wouldn’t know what she’s talking about? She’s perfectly competent, friendly, honest, her job denotes responsibility and the importance of truth. How could our stories conflict? I knew that people with cancer had been known to see things – I know this because I became worried about my brain and looked it up after she told me the door was never there - but cancer victims never saw just one non-real thing one time. What was going on? And were there at least rooms there, even if they’re covered-up? Maybe I was clairvoyant, seeing the rooms as they were before being covered-up? Did something happen there? Did rituals and sacrifices happen here?

It was a year later that I caught the very-down-to-earth husband house-owner alone in his yard. I took a deep breath and approached him.

“I have a sort of awkward question to ask you,” I said. And I told him: about the shelving, the worktable, the shovel and rake. The odd corners, the closet doorway that led to a miniature sanctuary. Pews, podium, darkness and a doorway I had walked through at the bottom of the basement stairs. He listened intently, and suggested that I’d seen the sliding panels that were under the stairs in the laundry room. But I hadn’t, even when I looked around in the laundry room to find possible explanations for what I’d experienced.

“Well, I don’t know,” he finally told me apologetically. “Because even if you had gone through the sliding panels, there’s nothing but crawlspace on that side of the basement. No rooms.”

There had never been a doorway to the left of the basement stairs. There have never been any rooms under that half of the house. But I experienced it so vividly! I could describe it so solidly! He suggested that it had been a dream, and even offered his own very-real-dream experience as a sample. I thanked him and stated that it must have been a dream indeed. But I walked away knowing it wasn’t. I had no sense of having dreamt this, or that I envisioned it mystically. I’m not religious or seeking a place spiritually. I don’t imagine workrooms, I don’t use them, there’s nothing pivotal about this vision. Except that it isn’t there.

Now, after stunned reflection, I remember that I never actually touched anything in those rooms. I had only walked on the floor. I don’t remember smells, I didn’t touch, was there actually a chill? I had been absolutely sure until now. Under my swirling reason that lost its balance, there is this door about which I will always wonder, but now there will have to also be a door that closes on this occurrence. Because it did occur. And until my questionable sanity emerges in my old age, I will leave it in the house with the room that isn’t there.